I'm a consultant and a flash developer, with former careers in graphic design, web strategy, and music production. My goal is to create better experiences through code, design, and talking about the business value of good user experiences.

Lately I’ve been playing with an idea of casual interfaces (in lack of a better term). The reasoning goes that we need less delicate interactions. We need to get things done without pixel-perfect precision when interacting with data. We need to be able to throw things around, pile them up, grab our arms around items, push them, pay less attention to what we’re doing, benefit from being less organized, stand on our feet not on our toes, rely on fly by wire…

It is indeed difficult to come up with user interaction examples for the sort of thing I’m imagining, but at least categorizing items by tossing them could work. Throwing items into piles that represented tags, for instance. Categorizing could also be collecting or rating items or assigning other metadata.

A month ago Riitta envisioned a gadget enabling casual interaction to transfer photos: a mat of sorts that you would place your mobile on and image transfer from phone to computer would take care of itself. No finding the right USB cable and carefully plugging it in, or going through the hassle to find the right settings and operations for bluetooth transfer.

Can you think of more ideas for casual interfaces? Think infinite screen corners and edges, big movements, gestures, result- and task-specific gadgets, short attention span, no attention span, multi-tasking with the world (eg. doing mundane stuff while watching tv)…

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on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 16:45 and is filed under English.
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